Tech industry

Tech industry

But are things getting worse? According to Register readers, and the company's own release health dashboard, the answer has to be yes. It isn't just you. The frequency of emergency out-of-band releases for the company's operating systems has been rapidly increasing to the point where, for every Patch Tuesday update, there'll likely be at least one out-of-band patch to fix whatever got broken.

In videos circulating on social media, IRON can be seen walking human-like to the center of the stage before turning to face the crowd. As it lifted its arm, the robot appeared to lose balance. Staff rushed forward to intervene, but the robot fell face-first onto the ground. The fall drew audible gasps from the audience. The event's host attempted to reassure the crowd, saying that robots, like humans, must "overcome setbacks on the way to a better future."

When an ETF pays weekly distributions sometimes exceeding 1% of its share price while claiming a 35% yield, you have to look closer and understand what's going on. Roundhill QDTE ETF ( NASDAQ:QDTE) launched in March 2024 with a simple promise: sell daily options on tech stocks, collect the premium, distribute it weekly. Nearly two years in, the fund has attracted $913 million in assets and a devoted following of income seekers.

For customers, this potentially represents a massive supplier shake-up, with sources claiming that hundreds of CSPs across Europe are affected. The news may not come as a shock to Reg readers because the direction of travel was indicated when Broadcom shuttered VMware's reseller/solution provider schemes in early 2024 and moved to the invite-only Broadcom Advantage Partner Program. Broadcom has also started to license new bundles, including products previously sold as standalone, and altered support for perpetual license holders.

So life is good. But not perfect, as he told the X sphere this week. "Appalled when I see workers on their phones. My dad used to always say 'there's always something to do.' No customers? Sweep the floor. Floor swept? Clean the machines. Machines clean? Organize stock. Organized? Clean again. Insane that anyone lets you on your phone lol. (I worked in various forms of customer-facing retail for about 7 years, but this extends beyond that)."

Instagram is developing a feature that will allow users to remove themselves from someone's "Close Friends" list, Meta told TechCrunch on Friday. The company says the feature is still in the early stages and is not being tested publicly yet. The social network's Close Friends feature lets users share Stories, Reels, and posts with a select group of people, rather than their entire follower base.

SpaceX and xAI, both companies led by Elon Musk, could merge ahead of a planned SpaceX IPO this year, according to a report from Reuters. This would bring products like the Grok chatbot, X platform, Starlink satellites, and SpaceX rockets together under one corporation. Company representatives have not discussed this possibility in public. However, recent filings show that two new corporate entities were established in Nevada on January 21, which are called K2 Merger Sub Inc. and K2 Merger Sub 2 LLC.

Paramount executives are brainstorming several ways to make their namesake streamer more competitive, including a short-form video feed, a sports multiview feature, and free content, according to an internal presentation viewed by Business Insider. The presentation was sent by Dan Reich, the Paramount+ head of global product and design, to Dane Glasgow, Paramount's chief product officer, via email in mid-January.

The company focuses on autonomous drones and AI pilots for use in combat and in contexts where communications may be down or jammed. Its technology enables the surveillance, mapping, and monitoring of spaces (such as inside buildings) without the need for human intervention. Unlike its competitor, Skydio, Shield AI has been focused on military objectives from the beginning, yet its defence tech has also been sold for maritime, policing, and border control operations.

Poettering is best known for systemd. After a lengthy stint at Red Hat, he joined Microsoft in 2022. Kühl was a Microsoft employee until last year, and Brauner, who also joined Microsoft in 2022, left this month. The trio are leading lights in the Linux and open source world. Brauner posted on Mastodon: "My role in upstream maintenance for the Linux kernel will continue as it always has." Poettering will similarly remain deeply involved in the systemd ecosystem.

One way to track the speed of the AI boom is to follow the hardware supply chain. Nvidia is the classic example: As AI companies build out data centers, they're buying up billions of dollars of GPUs each month, turning Nvidia into the most valuable company on earth. But Nvidia has suppliers too, and looking at them can give us an even longer-term view of the market.

For decades, tech companies have relied immensely on India's vast workforce, from entry-level call center jobs to software engineers and high-ranking managerial positions. But with the advent of advanced AI, which has been accompanied by employers greatly cutting back on hiring with the hopes of eventually automating tasks entirely, India's tech workers are having to cope with a vastly different reality in 2026.

The world today is witnessing the dawn of an AI-driven intelligent revolution, Eddie Wu told a developer conference in September. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will not only amplify human intelligence but also unlock human potential, paving the way for the arrival of artificial superintelligence (ASI). ASI, Wu said, could produce a generation of super scientists' and full-stack super engineers', who would tackle unsolved scientific and engineering problems at unimaginable speeds.

Patreon's blog post announcing the change made it clear that it had no other choice. "We strongly disagree with this decision," the company wrote. "Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy billing will now have to endure the whiplash of another policy reversal - the third such change from Apple in the past 18 months."

The Magnificent Seven have been running out of fuel well before we rang in the new year. And while the Mag Seven may have clocked in the most underwhelming first three weeks of the year in quite a while (the Mag Seven usually start new years with strength rather than weakness), I certainly wouldn't hit the panic button just yet.